--- In norse_course@yahoogroups.com, Haukur Þorgeirsson
<haukurth@...> wrote:

>
> "Eigi er mér skylt at trúa því," segir Halli, "at ÞÉR væri ALLT

ILLA GEFIT

> þó at ek heyrði það sagt."
>
> To me this means something like "utterly wretched". I don't think

it

> really means "evil" as much as "incompetent" or "a human of low-

quality"

> in general. I haven't followed your discussion on this, had you

found the

> following with Google?

Sæll Haukur,

Thanks! Hope London is treating you well. I wonder if the meaning
has changed over time (like the English word 'sad' coming
colloquially to mean "pathetic, laughably wretched")? It's often
hard for me guessing just from the context because you never know
when understatement or overstatement is coming into play, but this
is the example we were looking at:

Björn hét maðr. Hann var ráðgjafi konungs. Honum var allt illa
gefit, er honum var sjálfrátt. Hann var lyginn ok lymskr at öllu,
en þó eigi at síðr var hann inn mesti kappi ok varði land konungs
fyrir víkingum, ok því mat konungr hann mikils.
(Illuga saga Gríðarfóstra 2)

This seems to be saying that he *was* actually competent, in spite
of his underhanded ways. We found a few examples in saga
translations where it was rendered with something like "wicked".

Njáls saga, Hermann Pálsson and Magnús Magnússon
Njáls saga, George Dasent
Göngu-Hrólfs saga, Hermann Pálsson and Paul Edwards
Sneglu-Halla þáttr (Flateyjarbók), George Clark

The first two examples there also (hopefully) clarified of 'er honum
var sjálfrátt' [
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/norse_course/message/5643 ]. Of
course some of these might be influenced by others. In Zoega,
under 'gefa', we found (6) e-m er e-t svá gefit "s-one is so
disposed towards something".

In Hrólfs saga kraka, Elg-Fróði´s comment "Mér eru allir hlutir illa
gefnir", is given literally by Jesse Byock (to me everything is ill-
given) and Gwyn Jones (everything given me is ill-given). Which
sounded mysterious to me. But Patricia pointed out that "ill-given"
is actually found in Early Modern English with the meaning "inclined
towards evil, malevolant". W Bryant Bachman and Guðmundur
Erlingsson interpret this example quite differently: "evil is fated
for me". But I´ve found their translation to be a bit erratic in
places. The context is that he is explaining to Böðvarr why he has
to stay in his hut in the mountains robbing people, while Böðvarr
goes off to be a hero. So, just from the context, I guess you could
take it either way: as him saying in a self-depricating way that
he´s just not fit for polite company, or he could be saying that
he´ll never stop robbing people (something Böðvarr has objected to)
because he´s just born bad and always will be.

Hey, does the word 'garðshorn' mean anything to you (apart from a
place name)? The contexts seemed to imply a humble dwelling such as
a karl and kerling would live in, but the dictionaries were a bit
vague [ http://groups.yahoo.com/group/norse_course/message/5608 ].

kveðja,
Llama Nom